Of course, the opposite of white privilege is not blackness, as many of us seemed to think then; the opposite of white privilege is working to dismantle that privilege. But my particular hip-hop generation proved to be very serious about figuring it all out and staying engaged.
Adam Mansbach
As you keep pulling back the layers of how deeply rooted anti-blackness and white supremacy are in this country, it is exhausting, and it is traumatizing.
Alicia Garza
My mother is black, from Grenada, so my blackness was always there, but It wasn't until I started hanging with the upperclassmen black actors at my high school that I really got my roots in being a black American, which is a distinctly different identity and experience.
Amanda Seales
I want my portraits to create a space where blackness can breathe.
Amy Sherald
If our culture is so often readily and easily appropriated, imagine what happens when we embrace our full blackness and know that our contributions are just as important to the shaping of the country and, more broadly, the world.
Angela Rye
I never had a moment of realization about my blackness - I just was. Blackness was a central thread of my experience as a child and as an adolescent, as it is now that I'm an adult.
So often, blackness is seen in a negative light.
Angie Thomas
For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
In the racialized space of capitalist gentrification, police are not only arbiters of the peace, they are the muscle of retail racism: You can only be in this space if you transcend your blackness by showing us some green dollars. Even then, there is no guarantee that green will transcend your black skin.
Anthea Butler
Sometimes, when the neighborhood is silent and the sky is aswarm with the stars and the mind is swirling like a flushed toilet, a person gets to doubting himself. In the hardest times, the stand-at-the-kitchen-sink-and-stare-into-the blackness times, I put on Bob Dylan's 'Tomorrow Is a Long Time.'
Anthony Doerr
Somehow, whenever we think about race or blackness in relationship to art, we always come in kind of nervous. We always think someone's about to be punished or accused of something.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
If you are born black, and you don't accept your natural status as a victim, then the validity of your blackness is immediately called into question.
Candace Owens
There is a wide, yawning black infinity. In every direction, the extension is endless; the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal. Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce; but light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is also pure and blazing and fierce.
Carl Sagan
Part of writing a novel is being willing to leap into the blackness. You have very little idea, really, of what's going to happen. You have a broad sense, maybe, but it's this rash leap.
Chang-Rae Lee
Blackness remains the coat you can't take off.
Clint Smith
I'm not a representative of blackness, and I'm not a healer.
Colson Whitehead
I had a few brushes with death, where I nearly chose to go. The final one in 1996 did it for me. I suddenly had that feeling that I wasn't indestructible. There was no big white light experience, I just felt this complete blackness and a huge voice inside me saying, 'This is not right.'
Dave Gahan
Nobody told David Clarke what to think, what to feel, what to say, what to believe in, who to marry, what kind of food to eat - you know that thing that the race hustlers like to say defines your blackness? But yet every time I look in the mirror in the morning, I see a black guy looking back at me.
David A. Clarke, Jr.
The rising sun can dispel the darkness of night, but it cannot banish the blackness of malice, hatred, bigotry, and selfishness from the hearts of humanity.
David O. McKay
I am often asked what it is like to be on the 'front line.' But I do not use the term 'front line' to describe us, the protesters. Because everywhere in America, wherever we are, our blackness puts us in close proximity to police violence.
DeRay Mckesson
The history of blackness is also a history of erasure.
What is blackness? Is it the way you talk? Do you got to say, 'Dey this, dey dat.' Or the way you dress? Or is it the forgiving of certain things? What is black enough?
'Fantastic' is self-explanatory, you know? And the 'Negrito' is a way to open up blackness to everyone - you know, make it playful, international. It's extremely positive in my view; it's my affair with this music.
Blackness is a state of mind, and I identify with the black community. Mainly, because I realized, early on, when I walk into a room, people see a black woman, they don't see a white woman. So out of that reason alone, I identify more with the black community.
It was jarring to be berated for 'acting white' when I was placed in a predominantly black middle school in Southern California. I was also chubby, into boys who weren't into me, and tried too hard to fit into this 'blackness' I was supposed to be.
The very definition of 'blackness' is as broad as that of 'whiteness,' yet we're seemingly always trying to find a specific, limited definition.
As a teenager, my blackness was also questioned by some of the life choices I made that weren't considered to be 'black' choices. For example, joining the swim team when it is a known fact that 'black folk don't swim'; or choosing to become a vegetarian when blacks clearly love chicken.
I embrace my blackness, just as I do my conservatism and my Christianity, but I don't want to be defined or pigeonholed by any one of the many elements that make up my character.
The Earth reminded us of a Christmas tree ornament hanging in the blackness of space. As we got farther and farther away it diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine.
In our music, in our everyday life, there are so many negative things. Why not have something positive and stamp it with blackness?
I love my blackness... I love my queerness.
In America, mixed-race identity tends to invite both curiosity and suspicion, largely because few have found a way to interrogate it without centering whiteness as the scale by which to evaluate blackness.
I celebrate my blackness. I love the artistic vibrancy of the culture I was born to.
Blackness is not a monolith. We are not homogenous people; we are not all the same.
There's so much material out there that's unnecessarily racist. It takes a shot at what is 'urban' or demonstrates blackness with some sassy, neck-jiving character that's not even relevant to the plot. I see it time and time again, and it doesn't move the story forward. It just kind of cryogenically freezes us in this old racial paradigm.
I always feel like I'm warring with my womanhood and wanting the world to be better, and with my blackness - which is the opposite of whiteness.
I have a theory. An audience doesn't need to get wrapped up in blackness every time they see a Negro actor. And a movie doesn't have to be about race just because there's a Negro in it.
What I say about myself, black footballers or black pop stars is that we have been 'elevated out of blackness.' Because when people see us, they don't see us as being black. These are the issues that we should address.
I love Black History Month and celebrating my ancestral roots, but not just my blackness, which is so beautiful. But my Tahitian and my Italian - everything that makes me, me.
Since I got to this country when I was 12, I've been obsessed with this idea of whiteness and blackness because I realized I was neither. For me, it was so important to me to make a film that focused on whiteness because you wouldn't have blackness if you didn't have whiteness.
I'm aware that if I make a country album and release it, and it gets on the Grammys, the Grammys are going to put it in the Urban category. Just my blackness automatically sets it in there.
Being an openly gay black man, unfortunately I've had experiences working with individuals who've tried to exploit my blackness or my gayness in a way that doesn't make me feel comfortable, or they try to manipulate me into being a caricature of myself.
I understand blackness from the inside out. What my goal is, is to allow the world to see the humanity that I know personally to be the truth.
My paintings are very much about the consumption and production of blackness. And how blackness is marketed to the world.
A lot of white men in the music industry are promoting and participating in black culture in a way that is pretty careless. They want the currency of blackness, but they don't want the brunt that comes along with that.
The lighter the skin, the more acceptable you are. The darker the skin, the more marginalised you become. I want to demonstrate that you can produce beauty in the context of a figure that has that kind of velvety blackness. It can be done.
People ask me why my figures have to be so black. There are a lot of reasons. First, the blackness is a rhetorical device. When we talk about ourselves as a people and as a culture, we talk about black history, black culture, black music. That's the rhetorical position we occupy.
When I started, I was aware of using the black as a rhetorical device. It's understanding that black people come in a wide range of colors, but you find instances in a lot of black literature in which the blackness is used as a metaphor. In some places, you can find an extreme blackness used as a descriptive.
Blackness has always been stigmatised, even amongst black people who flee from the density of that blackness. Some black people recoil from black people who are that dark because it has always been stigmatised.
If you suffocate my blackness, you've got to realize that's supremacy.
